Hah, as a dedicated sun-avoider, I didn't even think about that. If the sun causes cancer, and nighttime causes cancer... what exactly are we supposed to do? Follow dusk around the world?

Yup, it's the only way to survive. Of course, in order to do that you'd have to fly pretty much constantly, which would cause deep vein thrombosis. Maybe it's better to take your chances with the night-cancer.

Reminds me of a manga by Shintaro Kago, in which people keep putting holes in things, in increasingly grand ways, to avoid having to worry about what might happen. It starts with someone putting holes in milk cartons, so he doesn't have to fret about it leaking, and condoms, so there's no worrying over it breaking etc. It ends up with a city full of holes and people with massive holes in their heads.

the world health organisation is bad for you health. all these health scares are like flipping some big switch in the universal mind that invites all these maladies in. kind of like which came first the legal problem or the lawyer? egg chicken = WHO disease

i have been exposed to a lot of new age thinking of late -- for instance the book 'the secret' which suggest we can program our environment with our thoughts (basically a re-hash of self-fulfilling prophecy) so could we be making ourselves ill? our brain controls so many things, what if is capable of building these diseases out of the chemistry set of our bodies?

does that make sense or should i lay off the coffee and cheese sarnies for a bit?

Oh, makes sense easy. Some things obviously aren't all in out heads, but some would certainly seem to be.

So I'd say it's partly all in our heads and partly external; we are fucking up our environment quite substantially. The question would be how much of each. And what can we do about it? I want answers, people. Besides "Kill all the stupid people and Move off the planet'," I know that one already.

i wonder to what degree they take in to account seasonal shifts?i'm in glasgow/scotland. i leave the house at 6am. i work inside most days, with no outside light. i leave work at 4, its pretty much already dark. so the whole artificial light and stuff affects people like me as well.

Yay! That makes 153698124(est.) things that give me cancer on a daily basis! Seriously, after this many announcements of "x has been shown to cause cancer", does anyone take these things seriously anymore?

I propose getting a big rubber stamp, inscribed "Warning: May Cause Cancer", and stamping it across the forehead of every baby born in indelible ink. 'Cause, y'know, it should just be there to remind us.

Anyone ever hear the bit about milk causing cancer? I was just looking, and I can't find it. I know I read it somewhere, couple years back....

The cigarettes will kill me before the nightshift does. And I'm pretty sure that waking up at 6am gives you extra* cancer. At least that's how I've felt every time I've had to do it.

The observational study was done mostly on airline employees and nurses. Which strikes me as an odd population to do a health study on, as one's swimming in aviation fuel fumes and re-circulated air all the time, and the other is surrounded by creepy sick people.

I was genetically engineered to subsist mostly on heavy manual labor, pig meat, and hard living. My maternal grandmother made it to 93 drinking whiskey, eating nothing that hadn't been boiled until grey (Irish, what can I say), and working shit jobs. I think the more you fret about everything that's going to kill you, the faster you die.